For All My Dreamers It’s Time We See the American Dream For its Alarming Fraudulence

It was once so easy to believe what others told me to be true about America growing up. That this was a space of opportunity. I was the outcome of a dream believed by someone who was allowed the opportunity to prosper. I was borne into a dream many believed she was probably crazy to believe in. The naive little girl from Trenchtown just wanted to be a doctor. She believed in a vision of herself that had nothing to do with me at all. I just happened upon the life my mother manifested when she was a mere child.

I came from a family that migrated to this land and did well in the face of adversity. With that as my daily reminder, I believed the myth that America was fair enough. I believed it was up to the individual to decide to do and be better. Cuz if we don’t, we’d perish and fade away into the pages of time written by those who would suggest we loved our own suffering. I knew that if I could believe, then I could achieve. I sang the songs they told me to sing believing the status quo felt the same:

This land is your land, this land is my landFrom the California to the New York islandFrom the Redwood Forest, to the gulf stream watersThis land was made for you and me

And the like.

I believed the past couldn’t be changed. All we could do in the here and now was march forward and avenge our forsaken ancestors by defying our oppressors with our unanticipated meteoric success. And boy did we. We took American culture by storm and reclaimed our rightful places as global influencers. Yet we all heard of the tales of door-bursting icons still having to take back entrances to appease the insecurities of white folks. But opportunity was to be seized by any means necessary, purely with the intent that one day our children could build their own empires and feel it unnecessary to have to break into others’ merely for a third-class ranking.

I believed in the ideology of meritocracy. I believed people were selected on the basis of their ability. And as long as that’s how you got here, you wasn’t a threat to me. Perhaps a rival, but nothing deadly. Because people who do the work don’t have to steal from, feel threatened by or denigrate their opponents. God blesses the child that has their own. So I never looked down at an immigrant who’s turn it was to shine in the faces of their own unique adversities.

Upon researching the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, I realized that all this policy is was a protection for illegal immigrants who’ve been here since childhood to not face deportation and be eligible for work visas. It was merely leaving people alone as they sought whatever opportunities America had to offer them. It was only a reinforcement of this nation’s supposed virtues:

And this quote etched eternally onto the Statue of Liberty was just talking about refuge. But immigrants have always been the workhorses that helped mold this country into the superpower that its become today and without thanks. A federal day off doesn’t cut it.

Upon the announcement today from Jeff Sessions that DACA would be rescinded I had so many thoughts, feelings, and revelations but I’ll streamline it into this: the American Dream is a hoax. It isn’t what we think it is. This entire administration has successfully exposed the true unsustainable nature of American racism.

It’s far too clear to me now that the only dream this country has ever wanted to come true was the all-white Utopia where their fairy Godmothers bippity-boppity-booped the economy into an all-time high while they worked at their barest of minimums as identical white picket-fenced houses overpopulated the globe and everything mysterioussly worked itself out because pesky people of color never lived ever. Because racism makes just as much sense as that run-on sentence. And that is the only reason DACA is being repealed. It just blows my mind how unsustainable this system is.

You would deport, imprison, or kill the populations this country deadass needs to survive. Hell, you would rather get sick and risk death then be seen out here taking healthcare from a Black man! It doesn’t get more unhinged than that. Y’all are sick. Everything this country is supposed to stand for is being seen for the lie that it is. No land of the free, no homes for the brave.

It only wants your tired or poor if the foreigner is white or white-passing. Because this don’t have shit to do with immigration, overpopulation, job theft, safety, the descent of wight walkers or whatever the fuck else as much as this has everything to do with racism. The more whites the merrier but you sun-kissed motherfuckers gotta chill. Because I’m really not hearing about undocumented eastern Europeans being targeted by ICE.

I’m baffled. Racism has always been a tool used to divide and conquer. The white guy is too concerned by the “dangerous other” that is surely coming any day now to get ’em to realize that it’s the uber-rich white guy looting you blind as you focus on the wrong shit. Racist white people be like those silly ass white girls from those 80’s horror movies who haplessly walk right into the fuckin danger while Black people yelling RUN BITCH at the screen. Yet you hoes never listen.

It befuddles me that these same white people (both the robber and the lick) will go hard as fuck in the comments section with faux ideas of meritocracy and bootstrapping but’ll turn around and be eager to take away initial opportunities from other people of color simply because they could never and refuse to even try too. White people been feasting for centuries and have the nerve to be jealous that we made soul food out of the scraps y’all gave us. We all earned this bruh! But let them tell it and somehow Black and Brown folks are lazy and that belief manifests into deportations and similar racist policies. It is all bullshit.

This goes beyond anger. It goes beyond the realization that the world they told me was post-hatred as a child was a bold faced lie. It goes beyond the frustration I have for the self-titled “allies” who chose to never fucking listen to the disenfranchised’s warnings that Trump and his supporters were very real threats to us.

I’m beyond the scope of being simply fed up. I’m past tired. I’m past sick and tired. I feel as if I am well over 400 years old. As if I carry the weariness of my ancestors who kept fighting for free. How long will the senselessness of white supremacy last in modern times? How long are we all really going to go through this insanity? I weep for how these times will be depicted 1,000 years from now but for all I know we might luck up and be the future religious text’s saints.

I am tired of witnessing decent people be punished for simply wanting the chance to earn what others feel entitled too. The American Dream is not for the white people who would rather luxuriate in this country’s ashes then see the rest of us prosper. Cuz truth be told, this was never yours.

For all my DREAMERS, keep dreaming beyond this dystopian present and know the world stands with you. The wildest passions that we manifest from within us always become the realities that our children are used too.

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